Surprise! VMware will join OpenStack

By Barb Darrow

Never say never. VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation, a group initially backed by other industry giants as a counterweight to VMware’s server virtualization dominance. Intel and NEC are also on deck to join as Gold OSF members.

Just in time for VMworld, VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation as a Gold member, along with Intel and NEC, according to a post on the OpenStack Foundation Wiki.  The applications for membership are on the agenda of the August 28 OpenStack Foundation meeting.

A year ago, a VMware-OpenStack hookup would have been seen as unlikely. When Rackspace and NASA launched the OpenStack Project more than two years ago, it was seen as a competitive response to VMware’s server virtualization dominance inside company data centers and to Amazon’s heft in public cloud computing.  Many tech companies including but not limited to Rackspace, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, Red Hat and Microsoft saw VMware as a threat and were bound and determined to keep the company from extending its virtualization lock into the cloud.

Steve Herrod, CTO and SVP of R&D, VMware
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

But, things change. VMware’s surprise acquisition of Nicira and DynamicOps last month, showed there might be a thaw in the air.  For one thing, Nicira is an OpenStack player. By bringing Nicira and DynamicOps into the fold, VMware appeared to be much more willing to work with non-VMware-centric infrastructure, as GigaOM’s Derrick Harris reported at the time.
This is a symbolic coup for OpenStack and its biggest boost since IBM and Red Hat officially joined as Platinum members in April.  And it’s especially important since Citrix, a virtualization rival to VMware undercut it’s own OpenStack participation last April by pushing CloudStack as an alternative open source cloud stack.
OpenStack Gold members, which include Cloudscaling, Dell, MorphLabs, Cisco Systems, and NetApp, pay a fee pegged at 0.25 percent of their revenue — at least $50,000 but capped at $200,000 according to the foundation wiki.  (VMware’s fee will be $66,666, according to the application, submitted by VMware CTO Steve Herrod, which is linked on the wiki post.) Platinum members —  AT&T, Canonical, HP, Rackspace, IBM, Nebula, Red Hat, and SUSE – pay $500,000 per year with a 3-year minimum commitment.

Selecting a private cloud is harder than you think

Most providers that started with public clouds now do private clouds, and private clouds in turn become even more confusing

By David Linthicum

As InfoWorld's Ted Samson reported last week, Rackspace has released Rackspace Private Cloud Software, which is the same complete version of Essex OpenStack the company runs in its own hosted private clouds. This move was designed to get Rackspace more traction in the cloud computing market, targeting the greater-than-expected spending on private clouds by enterprises.

Rackspace's latest release reminded me of what's been happening steadily in cloud computing over the last few years. While we keep discussing public clouds, almost like it's a religion, enterprise IT continues to gravitate toward private clouds in a big way. Not surprisingly, traditional on-premise vendors like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and IBM have responded in kind. But so too have the "traditional" cloud vendors, such as Rackspace and, with its Eucalyptus partnership, Amazon Web Services.

However, selecting a private cloud is harder than you may think, even when dealing with vendors you already know. No relevant standards exist, other than the emerging open source initiatives, and what constitutes a private cloud seems to be in the eye of the beholder. When you evaluate private clouds, you'll find it's difficult to compare them.
For example, consider features such as how a private cloud provisions resources, manages tenants, and handles use-based accounting, logging, application management, databases, and even security. All vendors approach these very important aspects of cloud computing in a different way, and some have skipped over one or two features altogether.
That's why it's hard to select a private cloud vendor. Of course, it always comes down to understanding technology and business requirements. But even with that necessary prerequisite accomplished, making sense of who has what and what it actually provides requires some detective work. Look beyond the hype to what is actually ready for deployment and how it all works together.

Cloud computing: The great equalizer

BY HERNS A. HERMIDA

CLOUD COMPUTING has emerged as the 'great equalizer' in business, and is rapidly changing the way many companies operate.

With cloud computing, companies are now able to launch easy-to-use enterprise applications faster for their employees, resulting in a far more productive workplace.

Local companies are now adopting cloud-based, capex-free business solutions that enable them to be more flexible, cost efficient and globally competitive. It is a paradigm shift where money usually spent on maintaining expensive, in-house or on-premise hosted applications, turn into savings, sans the need to invest heavily on hardware, software licenses, or IT personnel dedicated to maintaining these systems.

With the cloud, companies are now able to quickly implement easy-to-use enterprise applications for internal use, resulting in a far more productive workplace because of employees’ ability to work anywhere on any device, and helping the company focus on its core business and generate revenue earlier than otherwise projected.


The Budget Equalizer

With minimal investment on equipment and licenses, taking operations to the cloud is perhaps the most ideal way to do business today. It’s truly a game changer like no other.

In the past, only large corporations with the resources and capital to invest in IT, were able to streamline internal processes and manage operations through costly IT systems such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), and database management. Small and medium enterprises or SMEs, on the other hand, had to make do with what their limited IT budgets can provide, to stay competitive in the market.

Not anymore. More SMEs are now getting the same capabilities as their larger, more established counterparts, thanks to the cloud. Today, we see numerous business applications available in the cloud including ERP, CRM, financial systems, unified communications, and proprietary applications.

Amid all value-added features that enterprise cloud apps offer however, it is the “capex-free” come-on that has proven to be the driving force behind the growing migration to the cloud. Because these business tools are paid on a per account, per year (or month) basis, companies are able to manage their funds better and take their products and services to market faster -- while enjoying the benefits of cloud computing for their day-to-day operations.


The Productivity Equalizer

Consider this. A global leader in consumer cosmetic products, now uses its own social app that rides on its cloud computing infrastructure, to enable its sales consultants to connect with clients, and each other, and receive company and product updates in real time, anytime, anywhere.

Productivity is enhanced by the accessibility of cloud-based applications. As long as there is Internet in the area, work gets done. Remote and traveling personnel can easily access and edit files and systems in real time from wherever they are located. Cloud applications not only cut companies’ software costs by more than half, but increases productivity through real-time collaboration amongst multiple users.

Cloud-based business applications range from workforce management and sales distribution to customer relationship management and even customized applications, all of which aim to improve workplace productivity, and help organizations achieve business success.

Projects involving hardware installations such as servers, are also ramped up faster in a cloud environment. Resources are easily scaled up or down depending on usage while changes are easily made without the need to buy additional hardware.

A very simple way that a company can get one foot in the cloud is by enhancing their office email experience with a secure web-based service, instead of using a terminal-based email client. This way, work email can be accessed practically anywhere, thus improving response times and overall productivity.


The Security Equalizer

In a recent article, a leading Spanish bank did an initial pilot test for 7,000 of its employees to use cloud-based email and productivity applications. Finding no significant issues, the rest of the bank’s 110,000 workforce now trust the Cloud even for sensitive financial data.

With any computing solution, whether cloud-based or not, security is always an important issue. And security is one of the reasons why many corporations are still hesitant to take on a cloud computing mindset.

The best cloud providers are those that implement multiple layers of security to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of such critical information. ISO 27001:2005 Information Security Management Systems is the global standard certification that ensures this. By being ISO 27001 certified, cloud providers assure customers of world-class security measures for their cloud services, giving them peace of mind for their business.

However, though cloud security lies much on the ability of service providers to ensure physical and network security as well as the resiliency of its data center environment, it also rests on the ability of customers to safeguard respective log-in credentials which most corporate IT platforms use to limit end-user access to sensitive data.


The Effectiveness Equalizer

Large companies stand to gain from the cloud’s shared resources as it allows them to have more flexible operations and healthier bottom lines. Though if large companies in established industries can make noteworthy strides under the cloud, there’s no reason why SMEs will not be able to enjoy the same progress with the same inexpensive, secure and productivity-enhancing infrastructure.

One of the Philippines’ leading low-cost airlines felt the need to migrate to a cloud-based email platform from their existing legacy email system to enhance accessibility, security, and overall employee productivity. As cloud email services are highly scalable, the company was able to manage the number of users and online storage allocation as it requires, and pay only for what is used. Such flexibility can only be experienced with cloud services.

That was just for email.

A leading transport and logistics company in the country currently uses the cloud for various facets of their business such as account management, marketing automation, database management, pipeline management, and business analytics and reporting. It is a great testament to how the cloud can be an essential component of any business, even those with existing ERPs.

The Philippine economy is poised to hugely benefit from local enterprises’ continuing adoption of cloud solutions, especially once the technology reaches its tipping point in our developing nation.




Herns A. Hermida is the Vice President for Consulting Services - Business Solutions Group of IP-Converge.

OpenStack cloud fluffer growing faster than Linux

Two years in, and still not quite a cloud operating system

By Timothy Prickett Morgan

Analysis The OpenStack cloud controller, launched two years ago to the day by techies at NASA Ames Research Center and Rackspace Hosting, has come a long way in its infancy.
With Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace ramping up clouds based on the current "Essex" release, OpenStack is only just learning to walk. But it won't be long before companies looking to deploy private clouds – or to sell them as a service – will not only be looking for OpenStack to run, but to run well, run fast, and run networking in addition to compute and storage.
It's a lot to ask of a two-year-old, but OpenStack has a lot of mentors and advisors. If the OpenStack Foundation does what it is supposed to do, then it will be a meritocracy, not dominated by Rackspace, that will allow some of the best minds in the world to perfect a cloud operating system.
They may call it by different names, but the data center is the new server and a cloud operating system is exactly what Citrix Systems, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware have been seeking to build with their various software stacks.
The idea is to turn static physical hardware into malleable virtual hardware at the compute, storage, and network layers, allowing it to be programmatically controlled. Applications and their required software underpinnings can be puffed up in an instance and shuffled around inside a private cloud, or pushed out to a public cloud as workloads and economics dictate.

OpenStack started out two years ago as the marriage of the Nova compute controller that NASA developed for its internal Nebula cloud and the Swift storage controller and Ozone compute controller that Rackspace was working on for its own internal use. Neither NASA nor Rackspace wanted to be in the software business, but both felt compelled by the limitations of then-current cloud fabrics to throw both programmers and money at the problem.
The rocket computer scientists at NASA started working on Nova because of their frustration with the quasi-proprietary nature of the Eucalyptus cloud controller, which was maintained mostly by Eucalyptus Systems.
Rackspace wanted to transform itself from a simple hosting provider to a cloud provider, so it started work on cloudy storage under its Mosso subsidiary back in 2006. That effort got beefed up when Rackspace acquired Jungle Disk in October 2008, on the same day that it bought Slicehost, which had created its own compute cloud biz.
The Mosso cloud storage and Jungle Disk access code morphed into the Swift storage controller, which Rackspace currently uses in production. The Ozone compute controller, based on ideas from Slicehost, was underway when the NASA techies and the Rackspace techies decided to pool their efforts and at the same time foster an open source community to drive development of an alternative cloud control freak.
At the time, Eucalyptus was the early favorite as an alternative to VMware's "virtual data center operating system." It was embracing multiple hypervisors and virtual machine images to gain leverage over VMware and what would eventually become vSphere and vCloud Director. Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu Linux, embraced Eucalyptus and embedded it inside of its distro, and server makers fell all over themselves saying they were going to build Eucalyptus clouds.
Everyone talks about OpenStack now. That is, unless they are talking about CloudStack, the alternative now championed by Citrix Systems. Citrix left the OpenStack community (more or less) and open sourced CloudStack under an Apache license back in April. Citrix and the rest of the OpenStack community have a fundamental difference of opinion that cannot be resolved.
OpenStack, which is more or less driven by Rackspace at this point, wants to build a cloud fabric that has its own set of APIs. Citrix and the CloudStack community want to create an open source fabric that adheres to the API sets created by Amazon for its eponymous Web Services cloud. You can imagine that Rackspace would rather crawl through 500 miles of the west Texas desert than kowtow to Amazon, which pretty much rules the public cloud these days.

OpenStack ramps faster than Linux

Since OpenStack launched two years ago, a flurry of IT vendors and independents have rallied to its banner. Jim Curry, general manager of the Cloud Builders program at Rackspace and the man who spearheads the OpenStack efforts from inside Rackspace, says that the enthusiasm building around OpenStack rivals that of Linux in its early days.

OpenStack: If it were only as easy as this picture makes it seem (click to enlarge)

Curry did a little math, and he tells El Reg that it took 828 weeks to get 180 companies contributing code to the Linux kernel, whereas OpenStack had lined up contributors from 166 companies in 84 weeks. In terms of actual code commits, Linux had 200 contributors by week 615 of its existence, while OpenStack had 206 contributors by week 84.
To show you how developer interest has grown, there were 75 people in attendance at the first OpenStack Design Summit in July 2010. There were more than 1,600 people at the event in April when the "Essex" release was launched.

From Austin to Diable to Essex

At the moment, there have been over 200,000 downloads from the OpenStack repository, and that doesn't count all of the versions that have been repackaged by Canonical, SUSE Linux, Piston Computing, and Stackops. There are over 100 commercial clouds running OpenStack today, including ones from AT&T, HP, Deutsche Telekom, DreamHost, Korea Telecom, NTT, and Internap.
And, of course, soon Rackspace itself will offer a commercial cloud. It is currently in the process of beta testing the "Essex" release in production. (The Swift controller has been used for years in production at Rackspace for the Cloud Files service; what is changing is the move to the Nova compute controller and all of the other tools that wrap around the two.)
The Essex release had 235 code contributors, according to Curry, and even though the OpenStack Foundation, formed late last year and moving towards taking over the steering of the various OpenStack projects that make up the cloud control freak.
Curry says that the foundation will take control in the next two to three months, when the trademarks and other intellectual property will be transferred to the foundation, and that the goal is for this to happen before the OpenStack Design Summit in October. The governance documents for the foundation have been drafted and are sufficiently rigorous for Red Hat to join up. OpenStack is searching for an executive director at the moment and is doing interviews.

Jim Curry, GM of OpenStack Cloud Builders at Rackspace

"We used to manage the project, but we are now acting as a member of the community," says Curry.
In the wake of the initial code dump from NASA, Rackspace was pretty much the only code contributor to the project, but now Rackspace's contributions are down around 50 per cent – and that is against contributions that are two to three times as great as when the project was first started two years ago. So the amount of code coming out of Rackspace is actually growing, but that contributed by other community members is growing much faster.
"The rest of the community is taking responsibility for the project, and that is what we want. We didn't open source this because we wanted to control this," Curry says.
In fact, Curry says that Rackspace expect for the foundation to take control of OpenStack until 2013 or 2014, so if anything, getting it done by this October is early.
Incidentally, the OpenStack Foundation just announced in a blog post that individuals in the OpenStack community can now formally join the foundation and therefore have a say in nominating board members.

OpenStack: Folsom and beyond

With the Linux kernel and its related operating system layers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, each subsequent release was important because so much functionality was being added every time Linus Torvalds gave the go-ahead. Linux today is much more sophisticated and useful, but the changes are arguably not as jarring as they were, because Linux and the process by which it is created are both more mature.
As a two-year-old, OpenStack is still, in many ways, trying to code wings onto the airplane as the fuselage rockets down the runway towards liftoff. It is a fun time for OpenStack contributors, and this, says Curry, is one of the reasons why the ramp for OpenStack is steeper than that for Linux at the same point in its cycle.
"The promise of an open cloud is a very interesting problem to work on," says Curry. "We got into a market that clearly needed a solution."
It took a dot-com bust to really put the shine on Linux and take the bloom off Unix and proprietary machines.
The next release of OpenStack is code-named "Folsom," and it has just passed its third milestone, with the goal of getting it out the door in the last week of September. It will add Quantum virtual networking, Ceph block storage, and substantial enhancements to the Nova compute controller, the Glance virtual machine imaging system, Horizon management dashboard.
"Folsom is coming along well, and we have a lot of new things coming," says Curry. But speaking on a personal basis, not as someone in charge of OpenStack but as a member of the community, Curry wants the OpenStack community to slow down a bit.
"I am glad that all of these features are being added, but my personal focus would be to make this more usable," he says. "The speed of feature additions is not always conducive to ease of deployment and management."
That, ultimately, may be the other big selling point for OpenStack over other alternatives, aside from it being free if you are smart enough to support it by yourself (just like Linux). The Penguin was never going to be able to knock Windows off the desktop because of the overwhelming familiarity (and for many, contempt) that we all have with Windows as it has grown up on our desktops and moved into servers over the decades.
But in the cloud operating system racket, nothing is familiar because, quite honestly, so few companies are really doing anything more than server virtualization. OpenStack has an even chance of beating VMware vCloud, even if Citrix tries to go its own way with the Apache-licensed CloudStack and hitches its future on compatibility with AWS.
Microsoft is always a wild card because there are so many Windows servers out there and it can give away for free what others have to charge for. Red Hat is trying to do its own thing with OpenShift and CloudForms, but it may just give in, move to OpenStack once it matures, and ship a commercial-grade variant with support.
Year three promises to be interesting for OpenStack. That's for sure

Google's new cloud service said to be imminent

There's speculation that the Web giant may launch its cloud service during Google I/O -- putting it in competition with Amazon's existing service and Microsoft's rumored upcoming service.

by Dara Kerr

Talk has been circulating recently about Google building an Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing platform in the near future. Now, GigaOM is reporting that it's possible the Web giant could be launching this service as soon as next week during the Google I/O developers' conference in San Francisco.
The tech news site is also saying that several people familiar with Google's plans have confirmed that the company will also be offering its current app engine and storage with its forthcoming service.
The Web giant's platform will most likely compete with Amazon's EC2 cloud service, but it could also be up against a similar Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing offering that Microsoft is supposedly building.

Both Microsoft and Google already have software suites in the cloud, Microsoft with Office 365 and Google with Apps for Business; moving into Infrastructure as a Service territory could be a financial boost for both companies. According to GigaOM, Google's main target is actually Microsoft and its developer community. "The enterprise developer community is also one of Microsoft's biggest strengths, and Google wants to go after them," GigaOM writes. "In order to lure these enterprise developers, the company has focused heavily on making it easier to write, deploy and manage applications on its platform."
When CNET contacted Google for comment, its spokesperson said the company is not commenting on rumor or speculation.

Google, Microsoft head for cloud battle with Amazon

The 2 tech giants plan to pitch their cloud infrastructure platforms in direct competition to the e-tailer.

Amazon  is the leader in the cloud-computing space, thanks to the immense popularity of Amazon Web Services. The cloud-based infrastructure platform enables developers to create scalable Web-based software powered by the company's massive infrastructure.

Amazon competes primarily with Microsoft's Azure, Google's App Engine, Salesforce.com offerings such as Heroku and Force.com, and Rackspace.

However, Microsoft and Google offer cloud platform-as-a-servic​e offerings, which enable developers to run their apps on their servers, compared to Amazon's cloud infrastructure-as-a-​service offering that gives greater control of the entire virtual environment to developers. (Microsoft owns and publishes Top Stocks, an MSN Money site.)

Google and Microsoft are apparently planning to go up against Amazon by launching their cloud infrastructure platforms, which will compete more directly with Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud. Amazon generates a significant portion of its revenue from Amazon Web Services, and is on track to generate roughly $2 billion from this business in 2012.

We expect Google's and Microsoft's focus on cloud offerings and their efforts to directly compete against Amazon will lead to a decline in Amazon's market share in the space. You can check out the impact of a slowdown in Amazon's revenue from cloud and other Web services on its value using this chart:


Cloud and other Web services account for around 3% of Amazon's total value. We currently have a $222 Trefis price estimate for Amazon, which stands near its market price.

NASA Drops Development for OpenStack Cloud Computing Software

Space agency NASA is withdrawing its participation with OpenStack

Space agency NASA is withdrawing its participation with OpenStack, the open source cloud organization it co-founded with web hosting company Rackspace, according to a report by DatacenterDynamics.

Since launching two years ago, the OpenStack community of developers and cloud computing technologists have continued to improve on the open standard cloud computing software.
In more recent months, the open-source platform has seen a growing level of commercial adoption, drawing support from Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, Yahoo!, and Red Hat.
In a presentation at Uptime Institute’s symposium on Tuesday, Karen Petraska, service executive for computing services at NASA’s CIO office, said the agency will scale back its development of the open-source platform now that it has started to see commercial adoption.
Petraska added that NASA is not interested in competing with commercial cloud companies, and would rather be a “smart consumer” of commercial cloud services.
In addition to reducing its work with OpenStack, NASA also said it will cease its developmental involvement with cloud infrastructure solution Nebula.
NASA’s move comes just a few weeks after its fellow OpenStack co-founder Rackspace revealed it will continue to build on its cloud investments like OpenStack to ramp up future revenues following a slightly disappointing first quarter.
Meanwhile, OpenStack continues to flourish in development, releasing its fifth version, Essex last month. The new platform is the culmination of contributions from  200 developers, and boasts 150 new features.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory website was breached last November, which resulted in hackers being able to install malware, delete or steal private information, and take control of user accounts to access privilege sections of the network